Google to penalize websites mis-configured for smartphone users

Earlier this year, Google came out and announced how important the mobile web is to them and how they plan on handling non-optimized or mis-configured mobile websites. In plain language - they are going to penalize them and as a result their ranking will take a beating on mobile searches. Note that nothing will happen to your web search rankings if you are not following the recommendations but lets be truthful here - The web is moving towards mobile so will you care about your web results in near future the same way you do today? I think not!

Google wants to improve user experience on smartphones. This is great as it matches with our Mission as well. Here are 2 most commonly made mistakes according to Google -

1. Faulty redirects which happens when one is pointing individual pages on their site to a mobile friendly home page, as opposed to a mobile friendly version of that specific page. Google wants you to simply redirect smartphone users from a desktop page to its equivalent smartphone-optimized page. If there is no smartphone-friendly format for that page, instead of redirecting to the smartphone friendly homepage, Google prefers you to show the desktop content in a non-optimized manner.
2. Showing errors to smartphone users only when they access a particular page which is accessible on the web. Common scenarios include - 404 error page, Unplayable videos, Incorrectly handling Googlebot-Mobile and so on. The point is simple - Google wants to maintain the same user experience no matter the device.

So what should you do to avoid these mistakes? Well first thing that you should do is to pull out your smartphone and access your website. If you can say that you have a good experience browsing your website on smartphone, you are set. In short try answering these question:

1. Can you see your phone number without scrolling?
2. Is your entire navigation menu visible?
3. Can your customer call or email with just a click?
4. Are your links thumb-friendly?
5. Is everything visible without scrolling side to side?
6. Are all of your images and videos visible?
7. Does your site load quickly?
   

If you can't answer 'yes', you need to rethink your marketing and get a mobile website asap.

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